Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize)

by Saul Bellow

  He wanted me to know that my relations with Renata were no secret.

  “I hope that you and Mrs. Citrine and Mr. Pinsker will leave me a little something to live on, Judge.”

  Then we, the defendant’s group, were in the light gray speckled heavy polished stone corridor again and Srole said, “Charles, just as we told you, it’s the man’s technique. Now you’re supposed to be terrified and beg us to settle and save you from being butchered and hacked to pieces.”

  “Well, it’s working,” I said. I wished that I could spring from this official skyscraper with its multiple squares into another life, never to be seen again. “I am terrified,” I said. “And I’m dying to settle.”

  “Yes, but you can’t. She won’t accept it,” said Tomchek, “she’ll only pretend. She won’t hear of settle. It’s all in the books and at every dinner table every psychoanalyst I ever discussed it with told me the same thing—castration, that’s all it is, when a woman is after the money.”

  “It isn’t clear to me why Urbanovich is so keen to assist her.”

  “With him it seems a terrific fun thing,” said Srole. “I often think so.”

  “And in the end most of the money will go for legal fees,” 1 said. “I have asked myself sometimes why not give up and take a vow of poverty. . . .” But this was idle theorizing. Yes, I might surrender my small fortune and live and die in a hotel room like Humboldt. I was better equipped to lead a mental life as I was not a manic depressive and it might suit me very well. Only it wouldn’t suit me well enough. For then there would be no more Renatas, no more erotic life, and no more of the exciting anxieties associated with the erotic life, which were perhaps even more important to me than sex itself. A vow of poverty was not the vow Renata was looking for.

  “The bond—the bond is what’s bad. That’s a low blow,” I said. “I really felt that you should-have objected more. Put up a fight.”

  “But what was there to fight?” said Billy Srole. “It’s all a bluff. He’s got nothing to hang it on. You forgot to sign a lease. You’re taking trips to Europe. Those might be professional trips. And listen, how come that woman knows every single move you’re going to make?”

  I was sure that Mrs. Da Cintra at the travel bureau, the one with the paisley turban, gave Denise information because Renata was impolite to her, even overbearing. As to Denise’s knowledge of my actions, I had an analogy for it. Last year I took my little girls to the Far West camping and we visited a beaver lake. Along the shore the Forest Service had posted descriptions of the beaver’s life cycle. The beavers were unaware of this and went on gnawing damming feeding and breeding. My own case was quite similar. With Denise it was, in the Mozartian Italian that she liked, Tutto tutto già si sa. Everything, everything about me was known.

  I now realized that I had offended Tomchek by criticizing his handling of the bond question. No, I had incensed him. However, to protect the client relationship, he took it out on Denise. “How could you marry such a vile bitch!” he said. “Where the hell was your judgment! You’re supposed to be a clever man. And if a woman like that decides to bug you to death what do you expect a couple of lawyers to do?” Already out of breath with exasperation he could say no more but snapped his attaché case under his arm and left us. I wished that Srole would go too, but he felt that he must tell me how strong my legal position really was (thanks to him). He stood in my way repeating that Urbanovich couldn’t impound my money. He had no grounds for it. “But if it should come to the worst and he does lay a bond on you I know a guy who can give you a real buy in tax-exempt municipals so you don’t lose the income of the frozen money.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  To get away I went to the men’s room. As he followed me there I entered one of the stalls and was free at last to read Kathleen’s letter.

  twenty-three

  As expected, Kathleen informed me of the death of her second husband, Frank Tigler, in a hunting accident. I knew him well, for while putting in my six weeks in Nevada to qualify for a divorce I had been a paying guest at the Tigler dude ranch. This was a lonely rundown god-forsaken place on Volcano Lake. My relations with Tigler were memorable. I had even the right to claim that I had saved his life, for when he fell out of a boat I jumped into the water to rescue him. Rescue? This event never seemed to deserve such a description. But he was a nonswimming cowboy, a cripple when he was not on horseback. On the ground in boots and Western hat he looked injured in the knees, and when he toppled into the water—the bold bronze face with ginger tufted brows, the bent horse-disfigured legs—I went after him immediately because water was not his element. He was a dry-land man of the extreme type. Then why were we in a boat? Because Tigler was keen to catch fish. He was not so much a fisherman as he was intent always on getting something for nothing. And it was spring and the toobie-fish were running. The toobies, a biological antiquity related to the coelacanth of the Indian Ocean, lived in Volcano Lake, coming up from a great depth to spawn. Crowds of people, Indians mostly, gaffed them in. The fish were awkward, strange to look at, living fossils. They were cured in the sun and stank up the Indian village. Words like “pellucid” and “voltaic” can be applied to the waters of Volcano Lake. When Tigler fell in I was instantly afraid that I might never see him again, the Indians having told me that the lake was miles deep and that bodies seldom were recovered. So I jumped and the cold was electrifying. I boosted Tigler into the boat again. He did not admit that he couldn’t swim. He admitted nothing, he said nothing, but caught up the gaff and hooked in his floating hat. His cowboy boots had filled with water. Acknowledgments were neither asked nor given. It was an incident between two men. I mean, I felt it to be the manly silent West. The Indians would surely have let him drown. They didn’t want white men coming in their boats, filled with the something-for-nothing fever, and taking their toobies. Besides, they hated Tigler for price-gouging and cheating, and for letting his horses graze everywhere. Furthermore, and Tigler himself had said this to me, the redskins didn’t interfere with death but seemed simply to let it happen. Once, he told me, he was present when an Indian named Winnemucca was shot down in front of the post office. No one called a doctor. The man had bled to death in the road while men women and children, sitting on benches and in their old automobiles, watched silently. But at the present moment, high in the county building, I could see the late Tigler’s Western figure as if it were cast in bronze, turning over and over in the electrical icy water, and then I saw myself, who had learned swimming in a small chlorinated tank in Chicago, pursuing him like an otter.

  From Kathleen’s letter I learned that he died in action. “Two fellows from Mill Valley California wanted to hunt deer with crossbows,” wrote Kathleen. “Frank was guiding and took them into the hills. There was a run-in with the game warden. I think you met this warden, an Indian named Tony Calico, a Korean War veteran. One of the hunters turned out to have a criminal record. Poor Frank, you know, loved to be a little outside the law. He wasn’t, in this case, but still there was a touch of it. There were shotguns in the Land Rover. I won’t go into the details, they’re too painful. Frank didn’t fire but he was the only one shot. He bled to death before Tony could get him to the hospital.

  “It hit me very hard, Charlie,” she continued. “We were married twelve years, you know. At any rate, not to dwell on this too long, there was a big funeral. Quarter-horse people came from three states. Business associates from Las Vegas and Reno. He was very well liked.”

  I knew that Tigler had been a rodeo-rider and broncobuster, winner of many prizes, and that he enjoyed some esteem in the horse world, but I doubt that he was dear to anyone except Kathleen and his old mother. The income from the dude ranch, such as it was, he put into his quarter horses. Some of these horses were registered under phony papers, their sires having been ruled off the track as doped or doctored. The hereditary attainder rule was very strict. Tigler was bound to try to get around it with forged documents. So he was on the move from t
rack to track and left Kathleen to manage the business. There wasn’t much business to manage. He milked it of income to buy feed and trailers. The guest cabins folded and fell. They reminded me of Hum-boldt’s collapsing chicken farm. Kathleen was in exactly the same fix in Nevada. Fate—fate within—was too strong for her. Tigler put her in charge of the ranch and told her to pay nothing but essential horse-bills, and those only on violent demand.

  I had plenty of troubles of my own, but the double solitude of Kathleen’s life—first in New Jersey, then in the West—moved me strongly. I leaned against the partition of the biffy in the county building trying to get light from above on her letter, typed with a faded ribbon. “I know you liked Tigler, Charlie. You had such a good time trout fishing with him and playing poker. It took your mind off your troubles.”

  That was so, although he was furious when I caught the first trout. We were trawling from his boat and I was using his lure, so he said it was his trout. He made a scene and I tossed the fish into his lap. The surroundings were unearthly. It was not a fish setting—only bare rock, no trees, pungent sagebrush, and marl dust floating when a truck passed.

  However, it was not to discuss Tigler that Kathleen wrote to me. She wrote because Orlando Huggins was asking for me. Humboldt had left me something. Huggins was his executor. Huggins, that old left-wing playboy, was a decent man, at bottom an honorable person. He too cherished Humboldt. After I was denounced as a false blood-brother Huggins was called in to sort out Humboldt’s business affairs. He eagerly rushed into the act. Then Humboldt accused him of cheating and threatened to sue him, too. But Humboldt’s mind had evidently cleared toward the last. He had identified his true friends, naming Huggins as administrator of his estate. Kathleen and I were remembered in the will. What she got from him she didn’t say, but he couldn’t have had much to give. Kathleen mentioned, however, that Hug-gins had turned over to her a posthumous letter from Humboldt. “He talked about love, and the human opportunities he missed,” she wrote. “He mentioned old friends, Demmie and you, and the good old days in the Village and out in the country.”

  I can’t think what made those old days so good. I doubt that Humboldt had had a single good day in all his life. Between fluctuations and the dark qualms of mania and depression, he had had good spells. Perhaps not so many as two consecutive hours of composure. But Humboldt would have appealed to Kathleen in ways in which I was too immature twenty-five years ago to understand. She was a big substantial woman whose deep feelings were invisible because her manner was so quiet. As for Humboldt he had some nobility even when he was crazy. Even then he was constant to some very big things indeed. I remember the shine of his eyes when he dropped his voice to pronounce the word “relume” spoken by a fellow about to commit a murder, or when he spoke Cleopatra’s words “I have immortal longings in me.” The man loved art deeply. We loved him for it. Even when the decay was raging there were incorruptible places in Humboldt that were not rotted out. But I think he wanted Kathleen to protect him when he entered the states a poet needed to be in. These high dreaming states, always being punctured and torn by American flak, were what he wanted Kathleen to preserve for him. Enchantment. She did her best to help him with the enchantment. But he could never come up with enough enchantment or dream material to sheathe himself in. It would not cover. However, I saw what Kathleen had tried to do and admired her for it.

  The letter went on. She reminded me of our long talks under the trees at Rancho Tigler. I suppose I had been telling her about Denise, busy with self-justification. I can recall the trees she referred to, a few box elders and cottonwoods. Tigler advertised the gaiety of his resort, but the bleached boards were sprung and falling from the bunkhouses, the swimming pool was all cracks and covered with leaves and scum. The fences were down and Tigler’s mares strolled about freely like beautiful naked matrons. Kathleen wore dungarees and her gingham shirt was laundered to an ectoplasmic degree. I can remember Tigler squatting, repainting his decoy ducks. He wasn’t speaking at that time, for his jaw had been broken by someone in anger over a feed bill and was now wired shut. Also that week the utilities were cut off, the guests were freezing, the water was not running. Tigler said that this was the West the dudes really loved. They didn’t come out here to be pampered. They wanted it rough and ready. But to me Kathleen said, “I can only handle this a day or two more.”

  Luckily a movie company turned up to make a picture about the Mongol hordes and Tigler was hired to be the horse expert. He recruited Indians to wear quilted Asiatic costumes and to gallop shrieking and do stunts in the saddle. It was a big thing for Volcano Lake. Credit for this windfall was claimed by Father Edmund, the Episcopal minister who in his youth had been a silent-movie star and very beautiful. In the pulpit he wore marvelous old negligees. The Indians were all film-fans. They whispered that his garments had been donated by Marion Davies or Gloria Swanson. He, said Father Edmund, with his Hollywood connections, had induced the company to come to Volcano Lake. Anyway, Kathleen became acquainted with movie people. I mention this because in her letter she spoke of selling the ranch, putting Mother Tigler out to board with people in Tungsten City while she took a job in the picture industry. People in transition often develop an interest in the movies. Either that or they begin to talk about going back to school for a degree. There must be twenty million Americans who dream of returning to college. Even Renata was forever about to enroll herself at De Paul.

  I went back to the courtroom to pick up my primrose path youthful check overcoat deeply considering what to do for money if Urbanovich laid a bond on me. What a bastard he was, this Croatian American bald judge. He knew neither the children nor Denise nor me, and what right had he to take away money earned in thought and fever by such peculiar operations of the brain! Oh yes I knew how to be high-minded about money too. Yea let them take all! And I could fill out a psychological questionnaire with the best of them, certain of being in the top ten percent for magnanimity. But Humboldt—I was full of Humboldt today—used to accuse me of trying to spend my whole life in the upper stories of higher consciousness. Higher consciousness, Humboldt said, lecturing me, was “innocent, aware of no evil in itself.” When you tried to live entirely in high consciousness, purely reasonable, you saw evil in other people only, never in yourself. From this Humboldt went on to insist that in the unconscious, in the irrational core of things money was a vital substance like the blood or fluids that bathed the brain tissues. Since he was always so earnest about the higher significance of money, had he perhaps returned my six thousand seven hundred and sixty-odd bucks in his last will and testament? Of course he hadn’t, how could he? He had died broke in a flophouse. But six thousand bucks wouldn’t go far now. Szathmar alone owed me more than that. I had lent Szathmar money to buy a condominium. Then there was Thaxter. Thaxter, by defaulting on a loan, had cost me fifty shares of IBM stock posted as collateral. After many letters of warning, the bank, with ethical gestures and regrets, almost weeping to see me so cruelly stung by a conniving friend, took away those shares. Thaxter pointed out that this was a deductible loss. Both he and Szathmar often comforted me in this way. By appealing also to dignity and to absolute value. (Didn’t I, myself, aim at magnanimity, and wasn’t friendship a far bigger thing than money?) People kept me broke. And now what was I to do? I owed publishers about seventy thousand dollars in advances for books I was too paralyzed to write. I had lost interest in them utterly. I could sell my Oriental rugs. I had told Renata that I was tired of them, and she knew an Armenian dealer who was willing to take them on commission. Now that foreign currencies were booming and the oil-rich Persians no longer wished to work at the loom. German and Japanese buyers and even Arabs were raiding the Midwest and carrying off the carpets. As for the Mercedes, perhaps it would be better to get rid of it. I was always greatly shaken when forced to fret about money. I felt like a falling rigger or dangling window washer, caught under the arms by his safety harness. I was strained across the chest and seemed to be d
eprived of oxygen. I considered sometimes storing a cylinder of oxygen in the clothes closet for just such spells of worry. I should of course have opened a numbered Swiss bank account. How was it, that having lived most of my life in Chicago, I hadn’t thought to provide myself with a bagman? And now what had I to sell? Thaxter was sitting on two articles of mine, a reminiscence of Kennedy Washington (now as far behind us as the founding of the Capuchin Order) and an article from the unfinished series “Great Bores of the Modern World.” There was no money there. It was excellent, but who would publish a serious study of bores?

  I was even willing now to consider George Swiebel’s scheme for mining beryllium in Africa. I had scoffed at this when George proposed it but wilder ideas were commercially sound and no man ever knew what form his Dick Whittington’s cat might take. A man named Ezekiel Kamuttu, George’s guide to the Olduvai Gorge two years ago, claimed to own a mountain of beryllium and semiprecious stones. A sack of exotic burlap was at this moment lying under George’s bed, filled with peculiar minerals. George had given me a sweat sock filled with these and asked me to get them assayed at the Field Museum by Ben Isvolsky, one of our schoolmates, now a geologist. Sober Ben said they were the real thing. At once he lost his scholar’s air and began to put business questions to me. Could we get these stones in marketable quantities on a regular basis? And with what machinery, and how get into the bush and out? And who was this Kamuttu? Kamuttu, George said, would lay down his life for him. He had invited George to marry into his family. He wanted to sell him his sister. “But,” I said to Ben, “you know George’s boon-companion complex. He has a few drinks with natives, they see how real he is and that his heart is bigger than the Mississippi. It really is, too. But how can we be sure that this Kamuttu hasn’t got some con? Maybe he’s stolen these beryllium samples. Or maybe he’s bonkers. There’s no world shortage of that.”